I would be curious to hear the same thing, with some great big old sticks. What are those, 7As? I thought all of them were too pwongy, except for the shell one, which was clearly flat with almost nothing going on(but might have helped, in conjunction with one of the others, to provide a tighter better snare sound in a mix?). But yeah, (for me) snare mic placement changes a lot with how much the snare heads are moving, and i suspect that the differences between placements might have been more apparent if the snare was moving a bit more from some bigger sticks. I would also like to have seen my own preferred snare placement(when recording others' snares) of the high shell mic, which is still 90ยบ to the shell, but way up so that it is practically mic'ing the top rim. For a one-mic solution, that usually gives me something i can work with.
Personally, i thought that in the mic comparison, there was not nearly that much between most of them, though i suspect that in a mix, some presences or lacks would become more apparent. I was also struck that the 57 just sounded as i would expect a snare mic to sound, as it tends to. Something about the balance of the body and attack.
Now, either that Beta 98 is one strange ass microphone, or, the tuning of the drum drifted a lot between takes. A couple were like that actually, not as bad as that one, but if it is the tuning drifting around, then it does make it much more difficult to judge one or the other, actual and perceived pitch being maybe 90% of why a snare sounds the way it does in a mix. IMO.
EDIT: Listening through a second time, that snare is all over the place, tuning-wise, so the comparison really isn't all that useful to me, except to give an idea of what kind of cymbal/hi-hat/kick rejection one might get with that sort of placement between the tested microphones.
